Mandy Patinkin’s voice is as rich and warm on the phone as it is on television, or the Broadway stage, or on the movie screen.

Perhaps best known among today’s audiences for his work on the TV series “Homeland,” which concluded an eight-year run in 2020, he also won applause during COVID for viral social media segments posted by son Gideon that explored his family life, and he will always be remembered for his role as the swashbuckling Inigo Montoya in the hit movie “The Princess Bride.”

Now he’s in the midst of a long tour titled “Being Alive” that will feature him singing some of his favorite songs on stage, interspersed with personal stories. He will be performing Saturday at the Garde Arts Center.

“I wanted to get back in the game,” the 70-year-old Patinkin said during a 20-minute phone interview. “This makes me happier than almost any song set I’ve ever done.”

A previous set he’d widely performed a few years back before COVID had been a bit dark, he said, but now he wanted upbeat material, reflecting a dying friend’s admonition to “have fun” not long before he took his last breath.

“Having fun any way we can is a way to celebrate life,” he said. “I feel life without hope, life without optimism, life without so many possibilities ... you know, don’t bother waking up in the morning if that’s the case.”

Despite his renown on Broadway for being among the premier interpreters of Stephen Sondheim songs, along with being cast as one of the original characters in “Evita,” not to mention a long acting career highlighted in the early 2000s by his starring role as a doctor in the TV series “Chicago Hope,” Patinkin said nothing makes him happier than getting on stage to sing classic tunes that span the decades.

“If you said to me you could do only one thing for the rest of time, I would absolutely choose the live concert venue. It’s the freest form. It’s immediate. The audience is right there with you. It’s all about what happened that day, what happened that day in the theater. ... Everything’s different, and it echoes that way,” he said.

Always self-effacing, Patinkin downplays his role as interpreter of the music, calling himself “just the mailman,” not the genius who wrote the songs.

“Oftentimes I feel they wrote down what they wished for themselves, and what they wished for the world,” he said. “In many cases they couldn’t realize it for themselves, for whatever reason. But they left those words and that music behind for the rest of us through eternity to listen to it, to learn from it, to celebrate it, to practice it.”

Patinkin is committed to doing about 50 more live shows after New London, through April 2024. Meanwhile, he starts shooting a new half-hour comedy series for Showtime called “Seasoned” in August that will feature him and his wife, Kathryn Grody. The show is loosely based on the series of social media postings of the couple made by their son during the pandemic, though these will be more scripted, Patinkin said.

The social media postings began three years ago near the start of the pandemic when son Gideon filmed them having a fight on the anniversary of their first date more than 45 years ago. Then he asked them questions about the argument.

“Can I put that online?” he asked.

And so he put the footage on a site promoting help for international refugees, a cause that Patinkin strongly supported.

“Gideon gets all the credit for the social media stuff,” he said. “”He realized we are making people laugh at a time when people are scared. ... It got crazy amounts of attention. People liked coming into our house, I guess.“

Two years ago, Patinkin learned for the first time that some of his relatives had been killed in the Holocaust, a truth that apparently was hidden from him by relatives who surely knew. He broke down on the show “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., stunned that at his late age he had never before known about Jewish relatives from Poland killed in the Treblinka extermination camp, a place he had previously visited.

“I was grateful to learn the truth, but pained at the same time,” he said. “The global lesson is to tell the truth, always. It’s never a good thing to hide from the truth.”

Patinkin said humans are infinitely resilient, and the price for lying is always higher than the cost of telling the truth.

“It’s all about being alive, everybody,” Patinkin said. “We’re here for such a short amount of time, and you don’t want to waste it.”

l.howard@theday.com

If you go

What: Mandy Patinkin in “Being Alive”

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Garde Arts Center, 325 State St., New London

Tickets: $48-$88

Call: (860) 444-7373 x 1